David Zindell (born November 28, 1952) is an American writer known for science fiction and fantasy epics. He was born in Toledo, Ohio, and resides today in Boulder, Colorado, where he works as a test coach; he received a BA degree in mathematics and minored in anthropology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His first published story was "The Dreamer's Sleep" in Fantasy Book in 1984; his novelette Shanidar, which formed the core of his first novel Neverness, won the Writers of the Future Contest in 1985. David Zindell's writing style is at once romantic, heroic, deeply poetic, and concerned with deep philosophical issues in the human psyche. He was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1986. John Clute writes that the author of Neverness is "romantic, ambiti